ERBIL, Kurdistan Region -- Head north out of Erbil towards the international airport and just as you leave the city limits you arrive in the small suburb of Ainkawa. A neon crucifix emerging over the rooftops announces the area's Christian affiliation -- Ainkawa's population of 40,000 is mostly made up of Assyrians and Chaldean Catholics, as well as a small number of Yazidis, an ethno-religious group indigenous to the Kurdish region. In contrast to the wide avenues of downtown Erbil, Ainkawa's narrow crisscrossing streets give it a village-like atmosphere. Also unlike Erbil, beer, wine and liquor are freely available at any one of the many bars and liquor stores, where brightly colored icons of Jesus and assorted Christian saints watch over the customers. Father Ninos Esho is a priest at St. John the Baptist Assyrian church in Ainkawa, a domed brick building set in the middle of a wide sunny courtyard. Esho came to Kurdistan in 2007 after fleeing his home in Baghdad's Dora neighborhood to escape persecution by Muslim extremists. "You would wake up in the morning and find bodies on the street -- the bodies of Christians and people who had worked with the government or with the US army," Esho recalls. "We weren't allowed to cover them up or take them away, so the children would be playing in the street right next to the bodies while the dogs would be eating the corpses." Since 2003, thousands of Christians have fled Southern and Central Iraq to the Kurdish Region. It's a world away from the sectarian violence so prevalent in other parts of the country, Esho says. "We found peace here in Kurdistan. We are living in peace with the other religious groups." Islamic Spring "We do our best not to let anyone play with religion in Kurdistan," explains Sozan Sahab, a member of parliament for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). "We don't need that problem. We have a bigger problem -- we are Kurds without a state and have to contend with the political system ruling Iraq." But things are starting to change, she says. "After the Arab Spring comes the Islamic Spring. It's in the region, in the atmosphere. The mullahs have changed." And while, to date, Kurdistan's three Islamic parties have only 12 seats in parliament, she says, "they use the mullahs and the mullahs use the people." The mullahs, Sahab says, preach against other religious groups during their Friday sermons. "They don't give the message clearly but they speak against alcohol when the only people who sell alcohol are non-Muslims. It's a way of saying 'Christian' without using the word." And on May 8th of this year, one of those sermons led to hundreds of people taking to the streets of Erbil in protest of an article in the Chirpa magazine, which some local imams condemned as blasphemous. The demonstrators threw stones at police, and attacked a liquor store, television station, and social center, as well as a guardhouse outside the parliament. Security forces reacted quickly to quell the violence, dispersing the crowd and arresting protestors, journalists and five members of the Kurdistan Islamic Group who were charged with organizing an illegal rally. The government responded equally speedily to pacify the underlying tensions that led to the outburst of violence. Chirpa had already been closed down and its editor arrested on charges of "violating religious sensibilities," so Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani proposed the introduction of a blasphemy law that would "prevent any further offensive acts against any religion." Blasphemy bill Currently being drafted by a parliamentary committee, the bill would make acts of blasphemy -- broadly defined as offending God or the prophets, deliberately damaging holy books or religious buildings -- against any religion punishable by up to ten years in prison. Any media organization found guilty of publishing or broadcasting blasphemous content will be closed down for a minimum of six months. "This is idiotic," Sahab says, as she leafs through the latest draft of the bill, "I don't like it. It's against free speech. We don't have media censorship here in Kurdistan." But proponents of the bill such as Dr. Basher Hadad, a member of the Kurdistani bloc in the regional parliament and head of the Endowment Committee charged with drafting the bill, deny that the new law would amount to censorship. "It isn't prohibiting any freedom. You're free to say your opinion; you're free to criticize mullahs, scholars, Islam, the history of Islam. If you go to the universities, to the market, you'll see a lot of books that criticize religion, that criticize Islam. There's nothing wrong with that because they present their views in a logical and rational way. What's not OK and what's not allowed is insulting Islam." Hadad cites examples where people compared God to a pimp and minarets to penises. "That's not criticism," he says, "it's pure humiliation. If anyone says that is freedom of speech, then we don't want that kind freedom in Kurdistan." The law, Hadad stresses, applies to all religions equally. "The name of Islam is not mentioned in this law. What it does prohibit -- insulting God, the prophets, holy books -- is common to all religions. This law prohibits Muslims from insulting Christians, Yazidi or other religious minorities, too." Discrimination Outside the safe haven of Ainkawa, life isn't always so easy for religious minorities in Kurdistan, says Dr. Mammou Othman, Director of the European Studies Center at the University of Duhok and a prominent member of Kurdistan's Yazidi community. "We are the younger brothers," he explains. "We live here together but [the Muslims] say 'I am the older brother and you should follow my instructions. I have the power because my religion is more acknowledged than yours.'" And this despite the fact that Yazidis inhabited the northern provinces of Kurdistan long before Islam arrived, Othman says. "We feel like the first true natives of this country. Nobody is connected to the country like the Yazidi -- all our rituals are here, our main shrine is here. That's why the Yazidi believes he is part of this soil, this earth." He says. Today, Othman explains, Yazidis are the "underdogs" of the society, seen literally as devil worshippers by many Muslims due to their reverence for Taw